


Flood

by Cheeseanonioncrisps



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Crowley comforting Aziraphale, Gen, Ineffable Plan, Oneshot, i know i said angst but like, not horrifically sad, postcanon, questioning the ineffable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 14:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19319677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheeseanonioncrisps/pseuds/Cheeseanonioncrisps
Summary: Aziraphale has some guilt about the whole Flood thing.





	Flood

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Noah's Ark scene. Watch it again, look at how hard Aziraphale is having to work to keep his mouth shut when Crowley starts talking about drowning kids.

"Crowley, can't you turn that off?"

Crowley ignored him and kept watching. There had been a flood somewhere— where exactly he wasn't sure, there were so many different countries these days— and now the news was full of drowned houses, trees swept away by the water, people wading, crammed into boats or just clinging to whatever they could find to keep their heads above water.

"Crowley, please."

It was a shame really. He knew he shouldn't have expected it, not after they'd all seen exactly what could happen if somebody did try and put the world to rights, but deep down Crowley had hoped that things would be at least slightly better this time around. It was only a few months after the anotaclypse (a nickname that the kids had come up with that had somehow caught on before Crowley could come up with anything more suitably dramatic) and well, he'd put some new books in the shop, hadn't he? Sent Warlock off to America[1]? And scientists were still mystified by Tadfield's amazing weather. Things had changed, and so Crowley had begun to wonder whether some slightly bigger changes might have been made as well.

"Crowley..."

But no, there was a picture of a woman holding a baby in a tree, while the water flowed beneath them. The world was just the way it had been— good as new, and Crowley should know.

"Crowley!" The telly turned itself off.

Crowley turned round. "Oi! I was watching that!"

"It's _depressing_ , Crowley." They were in the back room of Aziraphale's shop, which had been closed all day and was apparently due to open at 3am, closing at 5.[2] The angel was currently repairing some new additions to his collection[3] and Crowley had been amusing himself with Aziraphale's television which, before he'd gotten to it, had been a small, boxy, black and white thing, but which now was somehow twice as big and capable of showing you programmes in 3D when threatened.

"So what if it's depressing? I'm a demon-"

 _"Were_ a demon."

"Well, I'm meant to enjoy depressing things."

An irritated sigh. "Then go and enjoy them in your flat, dear boy. Don't let me keep you."

Crowley rolled his eyes, lifting his glasses so Aziraphale could get the full effect. "What's wrong with it? We've seen worse."

"Yes, well..." the angel looked uncomfortable. "That was different. Business, not pleasure. I didn't enjoy it."

"Didn't seem to mind though." Crowley said, suddenly struck by the memory of laughing children running around in the dust, coming to look at the funny man and his boat and his animals. _Kids_. "I didn't see you complaining much about the whole Noah thing." Another sigh, and a pointed look back at the page. Crowley pressed on regardless— even after millennia, this still rankled. "Didn't mind so much then, did you, so long as at least eight people survived. Tell you what," he gestured at the blank TV screen, "let me turn it back on, and afterwards, when it's over, I'll nip on up there and put one of those rainbow things in the sky for them! That seemed to make you feel better about it last time."

"Oh for Heaven's sake, Crowley!" The angel looked up suddenly, and the book was slammed shut hard enough that Crowley suspected it was only divine intervention that kept it from being damaged even further. "Just shut up, will you? What was I _supposed_ to say?!"

Crowley was taken aback. "Wait, hang on, I didn't mean–"

"Oh yes, you're jolly well right, _evil demon,"_ Aziraphale said with the type of glare that Crowley had previously only seen him use on book burners, "yes, drowning all these poor humans is going a bit far. No, I don't see how the almighty could justify it, whether or not it's part of some ineffable plan. Now if you would just excuse me, my wings are blackening and I've got to be thrown headfirst into a pit of boiling sulphur!"

"Well, that's not quite how it–" Crowley took note of the angel's expression and decided that maybe now wasn't the best time for a lecture on how exactly one became a Fallen Angel. "Okay, look, I'm sorry about the Flood. I shouldn't have brought it up."

"You didn't have to stay." Aziraphale said quietly, opening his book and going back to glueing in the loose pages. "You ran off to China the moment the rain started. You didn't have to _watch."_

"Oh." Crowley had indeed chosen to leave the continent pretty quickly, rather than stick around for 'the end of the world'. He'd always sort of assumed that Aziraphale had done the same thing. It hadn't occurred to him that Heaven would ask him to stay, to witness...

"Was it..." he searched for a better word, but couldn't find it, "bad?"

"They kept banging on the side of the Ark." Aziraphale said, his eyes remaining fixed resolutely on the book in front of him. The glue was drying. "Lots of them. Men, women and children, and I just kept thinking— they had enough room. They could have saved them if they wanted to. Some of them. If they had enough room for two of every blessed species of beetle then they had enough room for at least a few more humans as well."

Crowley didn't say anything. Experience had taught him that that was usually the best in situations like this.

"I tried to get them to go to higher ground." It sounded like a confession, and the angel glanced quickly at the ceiling as if, even now, expecting someone to come down from Heaven with a sternly worded letter about it. "I couldn't think what else to do. But they wouldn't listen, and then there was no higher ground to go to." His eyes met Crowley's again. "They laughed, Crowley. Noah and all that lot. They were cheering and praising God as the flood waters rose. I mean, really, I remember thinking, if these were the only humans in the country that God considered good enough to save, what exactly did the others _do?"_

"You couldn't have done anything." Crowley said, putting a hand on the angel's arm. "You couldn't have saved them. It's," he shrugged, "ineffable. You just have to put up with it."

They'd had this sort of conversation a lot over the centuries. You had to, history being what it was. He thought the last time had probably been Aziraphale trying to make him feel better in 1940, after he'd just come back from getting a commendation in Europe for something he hadn't even _known_ about.[4] Normally it worked.

"But I could have saved them." Aziraphale said, shaking his head. "Crowley, we just stopped the end of the world. And nothing happened."

"Well, I mean-"

"Alright, alright, there was a bit of bother," Crowley remembered seeing that hellfire rise up, and shuddered at the thought of what could have happened if they hadn't figured out the prophecy in advance. _A bit of bother._ But Aziraphale went on regardless. "Still, we got through it, didn't we? We did it. We saved everyone. And that surely means that we could have, that I could have," he bit his lip, "saved everyone back then as well."

Crowley sighed. "Angel. It doesn't work like that. You can't go around stopping every natural disaster. No, listen," he could tell Aziraphale was about to interrupt, "we didn't save the world. We helped, but it wasn't up to us. It was him mostly, we just... gave him a bit of a push in the right direction. And," he added, "you said yourself that that could well have been part of the ineffable plan. We might have been meant to do it all along."

"But if we were meant to do that, then how do I know I wasn't meant to stop the Flood? Or, or anything, for that matter?" The angel looked back at his book, although Crowley doubted he was seeing it. "We could have stopped the plague, or the world wars, or—"

"No. _No."_ Crowley cupped a hand around the angel's face, forcing him to lift his head up and look at him. "Angel, you are not doing this. You are not." Aziraphale tried to look away again, but Crowley refused to let him. "Look, listen to me, you couldn't have done anything. The person you were back then couldn't have done anything."

"But-"

"No, shut up. You wanted to help, but you couldn't, and that's it. You believed you were doing the right thing, you believed you were doing the only thing it was possible to do, so you did it and you hated doing it _and that is not your fault Aziraphale."_

"But Crowley..."

"No, no, absolutely not. We're not having this," Crowley insisted, "because there is only enough room in this friendship for one melancholy bugger who gets all depressed about the world and ends up sleeping through centuries or having to be fished out of gutters and that," he jabbed a finger at his own chest, "is _my_ role, and I'm not about to relinquish it to you anytime soon." Aziraphale opened his mouth as if to argue, but Crowley didn't give him the chance. "For the last time no, angel. You couldn't have done anything to stop the big things from hurting humanity and throughout history, whether or not Heaven liked it, I've watched you going around doing your best to sort the little things as best you can— and you can trust me when I say that the little evils _pile up._ So no, you do not get to beat yourself up about this. Yes, I know you want to, but you should have thought about that before you became the nice one who always at least tries to see the best in everything. That's your role and you're sticking to it. Is that clear?"

A sigh and a slight nod.

"Good."

There was a silence, while Aziraphale went back to messing about with his books and Crowley turned the television on (making sure that it came back on already turned over to a program about sports). After a few minutes, Aziraphale spoke again, in a rather different voice. "Crowley."

"Yeah?"

"You know what you were saying about me only sorting out the little things, and natural disasters and wars and famines and the like being big things?"

"Yeah?" said Crowley, a little apprehensively.

"Well, one could _argue,"_ Aziraphale continued, in the tones of one who is very bad at hiding when he is trying to get round someone, "that while that might have been true, after saving the whole world one _could_ start to look at things rather differently."

"Could one."

"I mean, after saving a whole planet from hellfire and destruction-"

"Or endless boring eternity."

"Or endless boring eternity, a lot of previously big things might start to look rather little, by comparison."

"What?"

"Floods, for example."

Crowley groaned. "Oh G-Sa- someone! We can't do that."

"Why not?" Aziraphale said innocently. "It's not as if either your side or mine is likely to say anything about it."

"Because we don't have _time_ angel. We said we'd do the Ritz. I've already booked a table. We'll be late."

"We've been late before." Aziraphale said, applying the last touch of glue to his book. "It would cheer me up." he added, with a hopeful look in his eyes.

Crowley threw his hands up in the air. "Fine!"

Aziraphale beamed.

"But you're taking us there." Crowley added. "If you think I'm exposing _my_ car to that then you've got another th-"

And if there had been a customer in that shop— which thanks to a combination of Aziraphale's effort and Crowley's self-restraint, there hardly ever was— they would have heard the sounds of bickering abruptly stop and, going into the back room to find out what had happened, would have found it empty, with the newly repaired book lying open on the table and the TV still blaring in the corner. If, a few minutes later, they'd decided to switch back over to the news, they'd have been in time to see a reporter interviewing some very confused weather scientists about the recent floods, which had just started to go down for no discernible reason.

Almost like a miracle.

Later the Ritz welcomed two of its regular (though divine intervention prevented them from realising how regular[5]) customers in for lunch, one of whom sauntered in and over to their table without a glance at the maître d', while the other stopped to apologise for their lateness, and then again for the large amounts of mud and water they were tracking all over the floor.[6]

 

 

  
[1] Though neither of them would admit it, both Aziraphale and Crowley had been keeping an eye on their old charge— though not the sort of eye that was at all constrained by the fact that there was currently several hundred miles (not to mention the Atlantic Ocean) between them.

[2] Aziraphale had been trying various blatant tricks like this since the 1800s, and it was only the knowledge that the angel would probably never speak to him again that kept Crowley from redirecting a load of Oscar Wilde fans or antique book dealers down the road to the shop just as it opened. Demons have their own temptations to resist.

[3] "Why don't you just miracle them better?" Crowley had asked once.

"Because then I'd always know the damage was there."

"I'll do it for you. Save time."

But Aziraphale had given him a look that, he had to admit, probably wasn't that dissimilar to the one he'd have given anybody offering to perform miracles on the Bentley. Some things were just _yours_.

[4] Though Aziraphale had had to find him first. Crowley couldn't for the life of him remember exactly what he did for the rest of that month, except that it began with him walking into a little tavern in the south of Poland and resolving to take in as much alcohol it was possible to do without discorporating himself. Which, for somebody capable of minor demonic miracles, turned out to be rather a lot.

[5] Since about 1906.

[6] It hadn't rained all day, in London.


End file.
